


To Drive the Cold Winter Away

by zelda_zee



Category: Robin Hood (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-25
Updated: 2007-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-22 12:22:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,705
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/237957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zelda_zee/pseuds/zelda_zee





	To Drive the Cold Winter Away

The castle is cold in winter. Marian can feel the chill down to her bones as she lies in bed, not enough blankets piled atop her to ward it off. The fire has burned down and there’s no wood left to add and the room had gradually grown more and more frigid until she’s expecting at any moment to feel rime ice forming on the coverlet.

She is persona non grata in the castle now, her presence tolerated only because Guy insists upon it. The Sheriff wants none of her and he’s not hesitant to let her know it by a thousand small insults and humiliations every day – an example being the dearth of wood for her fire. But she can’t go back to the forest now that her identity as the Night Watchman has been discovered – she would never be able to fool Guy into believing she wasn't in league with Robin. And she can’t go home, for she has no home. With her father’s death, the manor passed to her cousin, who made it unmistakably clear that she was no longer welcome there.

So she’s left with the castle as her only option, and Guy her only protector while she’s within its cold, stone walls. Marian knows she’s a resourceful woman, but lately she’s felt the precariousness of her position keenly. She’s dependent on Guy’s good graces and the Sheriff’s unreliable willingness to continue to indulge him by allowing her to stay, and Allan’s uncertain inclination to keep his mouth shut and look the other way. Never has she felt so vulnerable, all the more so because she’s a woman – she has no illusions about what could be demanded of her to keep her place here secure.

Not from the Sheriff perhaps. She seriously doubts that she’d get exactly that kind of trouble from him, though he makes up for it with so many other kinds of trouble that it’s not exactly a comfort.

She can handle Allan. He’s biddable and weak, and she’s good enough to be able to play him, at least that’s what she tells herself. A part of him still wants to return to Robin, even though Robin will never take him back. But that part of him is what keeps her safe, so she fans his hopes just a bit. It makes her feel a little guilty, but really, compared to what she’s done to Guy it’s child's play.

Guy is the one she worries about, not least because she can feel her own longing threatening to overwhelm her caution. She wants to surrender, and if she does she knows he will crash over her like a great wave, implacable, irresistible and devastating. Her virtue is her treasure and her weapon and once it’s gone she has nothing left to fight or bargain with, so she resists. She walks the knife-edge of desire and she makes him walk it too. She doesn’t look down, for the fall would be long and the landing hard.

Robin urges her to leave and when she’s with him she wants to, wants to throw away comfort and safety and live a live of freedom in the forest. She envies Djaq, making her own rules, fighting as an equal amongst the men, taking what she desires from whichever one of them pleases her at the moment. Not Robin though, Djaq tells her. Robin won’t have her because he belongs to Marian, though Marian suspects it may have more to do with her being a Saracen. Robin makes a show of virtue, but she knows that beneath it he’s just a man, no better and no worse than the rest of them.

Robin is light and laughter and freedom. Guy is darkness and heat and passion. She wants both and thinks it’s a cruel, cruel fate that has bestowed two such men on her and will allow her to have neither.

She gets out of bed, shivering, her teeth chattering in the icy air. She needs warmth. Downstairs in the great hall the fire will still be burning and if she’s lucky there will be a space somewhere close to it amongst the men and the dogs where she can curl up.

She slips her woolen leggings on beneath her gown, shoves her feet into her boots and wraps her warmest cloak around her. The castle seems deserted at this late hour and she moves swiftly and quietly through the long corridors that are even colder than her room. As she passes a narrow window she sees snow falling against dark sky and she pulls her cloak around her more tightly.

The hall is crowded with sleeping bodies, human and canine. The men snore and groan and mumble but none of them wake. Several of the dogs raise their heads, but when they see it’s only her they rest them on their paws again with sleepy whines.

The flames dance high in the huge fireplace. She can feel the warmth whisper across her face even from the outskirts of the circle of sleepers. At first she thinks there is no free space, but then she sees an empty spot just to the left of the hearth, probably too far to the side to be truly warm, but at least sure to provide more comfort than her room.

The floor is hard as she settles onto it, but at least the stone is warm. She lays down with a sigh, resting her head on her arm, hoping that enough of it will reach her to enable her to sleep. From her position she surveys the score or so of indistinct lumps of sleeping figures sprawled out on the flagstones – guards taking what rest they can between shifts, others who have come from the outlying areas of the castle seeking the heat of the fire. Her eye falls on the one closest to the hearth and she almost gasps aloud. It’s Guy, laying on some kind of thin pallet of straw and muslin, that and his occupation of the most advantageous spot obviously a deference to his rank.

He’s not wearing his leather jerkin for once. She can see it folded beneath his head as a pillow. She can’t see what he _is_ wearing, for he’s covered by his cloak like all the rest of the men, but he looks different without the jerkin and she realizes how she thinks of it as a part of him, like some kind of second skin, armor-like. She can see the pale curve of the nape of his neck, for his chin’s tilted down to his chest and it looks naked and too exposed, as if he’s bending his head for the ax. His hair falls forward across his forehead, a sharp, dark shadow that cuts across one eye.

She’s staring when the eye opens, looking straight at her. She snaps her eyes closed, but she can feel the weight of his gaze and she knows he saw her watching.

“Marian,” he hisses.

Reluctantly she looks at him.

He says nothing, just hold the edge of his cloak up in invitation. Her eyes widen in affronted modesty, but he just shakes his head and gives her that crooked smirk.

“Thought you might be _cold_ ,” he whispers, and she is, she's damned bloody cold and she can see that Guy’s cheeks are flushed with the heat of the fire. Surely, it wouldn’t be such a terrible sin to avail herself of that offer of shared warmth?

It’s odd, she muses, as she crawls stealthily through the sea of sleeping bodies, that though she knows Guy is a killer and a mercenary and though she tells herself over and over that he is not a good man (for she finds it far too easy to forget when he looks at her from beneath dark, lowering brows or when he dares to touch her or when she remembers the hunger of his kiss), still she trusts him not to harm her, for he tried and he could not, though he clearly had meant to. When it came to the moment, he buckled, and that knowledge gives her courage.

She meets his eyes as she kneels by his side and she can see desire in them. He reaches out and barely touches a lock of her hair that is hanging between them, then gives her a slight nod.

“It’s just for warmth,” she says to be sure, and he nods again.

He holds up his cloak and she climbs in beneath it, turning her back to him and facing the fire. He tucks it securely around her before she feels him settle down behind her. He doesn’t touch her, though she can tell his body is only inches away. She can feel the warmth of his breath on her shoulder and it sends chills up her spine that somehow spread heat throughout her limbs, all the way to her numbed toes and fingers.

He shifts and she tenses, dreading the press of his body or the touch of his hand even as she longs for it.

“Hush,” he says softly. “You’re safe. I shan’t touch you.”

She hears him sigh and he shifts again, his leg brushing hers before he moves away. She stares at the fire, listening to him breathe, thinking she’ll never lay with him in the marriage bed and that this is as close to that as they’ll ever come. She knows she shouldn’t regret that, that her future holds the light and laughter that is Robin and that Guy would only bring her misery, yet she can’t ignore the way her body sparks and kindles at his nearness and the way she aches for his touch with a deep, physical yearning.

At long last she sleeps, waking at dawn when the men around her stir, but Guy is already gone.

The castle is cold in winter and Marian can feel the chill down to her bones. She tells herself that is why she rises the next night and makes her way through frigid corridors to the great hall to lay before the roaring fire beside a man she should not want and does not love and will never have.


End file.
